Splogs Bring Spam to the Blogosphere

The blogs set up by the students in Emi's "Politics and the New Media" class have not been used by many of the students since the class ended. However, they continue to have postings from visitors to their blogs. Here is a typical posting:

Hey, you have a great blog here! I'm definitely going to bookmark you!

I have a freshtraffic.com targeted traffic traffic unlimited site/blog. It pretty much covers freshtraffic.com targeted traffic traffic unlimited related stuff.

Come and check it out if you get time:-)

This entry is part of a phenomenon that is known as a "splog" — a combination of the words "spam" and "blog." These thinly disguised sales pitches make comments that are unrelated or marginally related to your previous blog entry, and then attempt to steer you to another blog or website to look at cell phones, porn, video games, or whatever else they are pushing.

As the Washington Post reported, this problem is making it hard for legitimate bloggers:

Ben Popken, keeper of a blog called TheSpunker, recently searched the Internet for Swiss army knives and found himself stymied by splogs. Every time he typed in the topic on a blog search engine, he kept pulling up a site that appeared to be a legitimate blog but was filled with links to other Web sites.

How to police these robot bloggers? Some blog vendors have started requiring verification before you can create a blog or write a comment on an existing blog. Ultimately, however, the need to maintain the openness of the blogosphere necessitates that they do more. As Anne P. Mitchell, president and chief executive of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy and a law professor at the Lincoln Law School of San Jose said:

"It's rarely worth the resources and time it takes to find [splogs]. [However,] from an ethical, moral, good Internet neighbor perspective,... if they have the ability to do so, they should do so."